Avoiding Dangerous Sexuality in Jane Eyre

ust as Jane has not knowingly agreed to a bigamous marriage,
neither Lucy nor Bertha can avoid their dangerous sexuality. They
are still, however seen as morally responsible, since they pose a
real temptation and threat to the men around them. Attempts to
confine them — Jane in her room after discovering Bertha's
existence, Bertha in her den, Lucy in her garlic filled bedroom
and tomb — are insufficient to contain the danger. Jane's
innate morality forces her to leave and Lucy is saved from
eternal damnation by symbolic masculine dominance - a stake
through her body — but Bertha dies unredeemed in a sheet of flame
reminiscent of Hell.

All the novels I have chosen to look at reinforce the
restrictive sexual values aspired to by a small but influential
strata of Victorian society. Fanny Price is a positive role model
for the patient and self abnegating ideal described by Mill. She
suffers emotional mistreatment without complaint and is assertive
only when making moral choices in the face of pressure or
disapproval from others. In contrast Lucy Westenra is overcome by
her own sensuality, which once aroused can only be subdued by
gruesome and dramatic measures. Although the vampire is a
fictional creation, and the New Woman was unlikely to come to
exactly this end, the message is clear — the rejection of a
proper woman's role (represented by Lucy's planned
marriage to Arthur) is a dangerous undertaking.

Jane Eyre is not so obviously traditional, and Jane,
struggling between her love of God and her passionate nature, has
the potential to become either a Fanny Price or a Bertha Mason.
Jane Eyre has been called a feminist novel, in particular
Jane's speech including the words:

Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain and
little I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I
have as much soul as you and fully as much heart

but, as R. B. Martin points out, this is not a plea for
equality on anything but an emotional level. Jane never questions
her limited career choices or her subservient role, and although
she believes in self determination she is not New Woman enough to
reject conventional morality.

I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I
will hold to the principals received by me when I was
sane, not mad as I am now They have a worth - so I
have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now it
is because I am insane - quite insane: with my veins
running fire and my heart beating faster than I can count
its throbs.

Like St John Rivers, she is not immune to sexual feeling but
recognises it for the temptation it is. The reference to
sexuality as insanity is a clear link to Bertha Mason but Jane
rejects it where Bertha did (or could) not and, shorn of her
excessive passions, is awarded a happy, contented and
conventional future as Rochester's wife/nurse and the mother
of his children.

Though characters like Jane are fictional, the situations they
face and the motivations with which they act are given to them by
real authors who must be influenced by their own societies. The
morality I have identified in these books was a phenomenon of the
nineteenth-century middle class, not evident in earlier novels
like Moll Flanders, nor in later ones
such as those by D. H. Lawrence. However, while it lasted it was
extremely powerful and those who, like Hardy, tried to portray an
alternative faced widespread condemnation. Eventually the
recognition of the hypocrisy within Victorian society and the
death in 1901 of the Queen with whom the moral regime had been
associated brought about its overthrow. In a sense the threat to
society which the Victorians saw in liberated sexuality was a
real one. The sex roles and class distinctions of the nineteenth
century no longer exist; society is less structured and more
informal. Perhaps this is one reason their recognition of the
threat is of such interest to the twentieth-century reader.